ohlidalp
commented
3 months ago Greetings, This topic hasn't been brought up in about a decade. I generally agree that the categories aren't super friendly to new players, but making a change there needs to be carefully considered given the age and history of both the game and majority of the mods.
I'll try to put together a list of considerations from the top of my head - further debate will be needed within the community:
- The category numbers are embedded directly in the mod files, see https://docs.rigsofrods.org/vehicle-creation/fileformat-truck/#fileinfo
- specifying category number is optional, that's why some mods fall into 'Unsorted'.
- The category names in the game (the selector UI) are localized.
- Vast majority of the mods comes from RoR' peak popularity era ~2006- 2011 and were published on former web repository.
- Since ~2016 we have a new web repository with it's own categories (fully restoring the old ones wasn't technically feasible AFAIK). The mods are being reuploaded there from archive.
- Since ~2021 we also have an in-game repository browser which uses the new categories (the repo cannot see the old ones) and these aren't localized IIRC.
All things considered, I think we could do the following:
- visually group some of the old categories together in the Selector UI.
- for mods without category, assign one based on file extension, see https://docs.rigsofrods.org/vehicle-creation/fileformat-truck/#is-it-a-truck-plane-train-or-boat
I believe that the current in-game categories (pictured below) result in too much ambiguity:
This is demonstrated by multiple instances of a vehicle type being spread across multiple different categories, making it very hard for a new player to just browse through vehicles of a given type.
I suggest replacing these categories with the new ones below. These categories are designed specifically to remove ambiguity and make finding vehicles from the menu much easier. They serve as sane defaults, and will compliment any future sorting and UI customization.
All Fresh Airplanes and Flying Vehicles ATVs, Monster Trucks, Tanks Bikes & Motorcycles Boats Buses Emergency Response Vehicles Heavy Equipment and Cranes Off-road Vehicles & Rock Crawlers Pickup Trucks & Vans Sedans, SUVs, Wagons Semi-truck/Lorry Tractor Units Trailers & Semi-truck Trailers Trains & Trams Vehicle Accessories and Parts Non-vehicle Objects Unsorted
Note that use of the 'Unsorted' category should be heavily discouraged.
Any issues with compatibility could potentially be solved by mapping old category names to new ones, just to ensure a working experience until an effort to re-categorize mods is initiated.
Thank you for considering this important fix.